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Hey everyone, Just wanted to share I recently ordered a curt trailer hitch from etrailer.com for my 2014 LWB Titanium and am very pleased. Great pricing, shipped fast, packed well, tutorial videos for install, and great instructions included made the installation a breeze. Definitely recommend these guys... https://www.etrailer.com/Trailer-Hitch/Ford/Transit+Connect/2014/C13167.html?vehicleid=201422753 All the best, Justin

As someone who, until recently, designed suspensions professionally, even a few pounds of unsprung weight is a big deal. The fact that the solid rear axle design is slightly lighter than a solid, live rear axle design doesn't make it a good design. That's like trying to say it's ok because you caught the good leprosy. Unsprung weight is one of the few design factors where the ONLY correct number is 0 and anything other than that is bad. The farther you are away from 0, the worse it gets. It dramatically affects the ability of the tire to track the road which leads to big changes in road-holding. This is, obviously, a handling issue but what everyone forgets is that it's also a safety issue. Cars with well optimized suspension stop better, swerve better, and are less likely to roll over. All of these things may someday make the difference between avoiding a crash and being in a life-threatening accident. Simply put, cars with better performing suspension are safer than cars compromised in the name of cost (and under the shield of customer ignorance). If you guys remember when Ford brought out the new pickup trucks, they did a series of videos with Mike Rowe comparing the Ford to the competitors. They showed the trucks driving over various test tracks and real world scenarios showing how much better the Ford did than the competition. One of the big things that the videos shows was that (even though they're all using stone age technology) the Ford truck's suspension was better optimized and produced better real world results. So even in trucks, this stuff matters. For that matter, even without the pumpkin, the solid rear axle is an antiquated design that should have been abandoned for all non-haulage uses around the time we got rid of steam trains. Fully independent suspension should be the only default for a passenger vehicle (and remember, these things are basically a Focus with a box on top). The problem is that a solid, undriven rear axle is cheap. Ford made the gamble that most of their consumers are uneducated about basic engineering (which is definitely true. Americans love cars but know, on average, staggeringly little about how they work) and simply wouldn't know any better. You see the same cost-cutting design in other small, cheap cars. To bring this back to a context for this forum (though admittedly straying from the discussion of unsprung weight), the Connect has a solid rear axle while the... crap, whatever Dodge is calling the Fiat Doblo here in the US... has fully independent suspension. I was able to find a dealer that had both (company owned a Ford and Dodge dealership on the same parking lot) and test drive them repeatedly back to back in the hills of Appalachia. The Doblo's rear end was SUBSTANTIALLY better controlled than the Connect's and the Doblo also was much more comfortable to ride in (my Connect doesn't smooth out in the rear end until I get about 600lbs of payload in the back). From a ride quality and handling viewpoint, the Doblo was vastly superior to the Connect. However, the Doblo's windshield stopped so low that I couldn't see traffic lights when I pulled up to the stop bar, so the Connect won the shootout because of that.

Cool. Looks like you got the necessary stuff you need during long travel.

Some of it are already well known bloopers, updated: https://www.sadanduseless.com/2018/01/car-ad-failures/ (this here is Finnish, clearly meant to be "REKKAPESU" (truck wash).

I also have the Curt trailer hitch and wiring kit, and as I have a raised ball mount to fit my trailer, I end up with a scenario very similar. My solutions are: 1 - Remove the ball mount if I don't need it; it only takes seconds to remove, and I don't like to bump into it. 2 - I have a switch to temporarily disable the alarm when I have the ball mount installed or when I back up with a trailer. (2015 XLT wagon). The switch leaves the camera active.